I'm glad to see that at least Dave B is reading this nonsense.  I didn't get a pingback, though Dave, I saw it because I read your post via RSS.  Is that deliberate?  I don't remember how these things work. Maybe it's an artefact of the way your microposts are aggregated?  

Anyway.

I agree with the thing about reading and writing in the same place –  I want it to be my (the writer's) place, not yet another centralising force who one day might be tempted to wall it all off.  Having a reader built in to the blogging tool was one of the features that I really liked in Radio Userland, back in the brief period that I used it.  I actually used it more for reading than writing due to my well-known shyness about talking in public…

The use cases I'm thinking of at the moment are for groups to blog and learn together.  So a collected feed from all the people in the group (although a curated set of feeds from outside would be a useful thing too).

I just tried to find my old Userland blog, but instead, Google just threw up this to distract me.  Somehow, in 2010, I was invited to take part in a couple of editions of BBC Radio 5 live's "On The Money" with Declan Curry.  My brief was to answer listener's questions on how to use social networking in business.  It was fun.  I got to sit in the Today studio then at TVC.  Many of the questions were basically "how do I use this magic social media thing to do magic and make my business really successful, tomorrow?" and I suspect my answers about there being no magic other than persistence and patience was what led to me not being asked back more than once.